Various rotary kinematic mechanisms and configurations based on radial vanes inside a toroid/torus chamber are known for use in fluid handling machines where the rotor and stator elements vary the volume entrapped between them. For example the concept in U.S. Pat. No. 3,592,571, U.S. Pat. No. 4,153,396, include relative motion between two or more vane elements distributed within a chamber, where the relative motion is controlled by means of external gearing or control the accelerating and retarding forces of rotor elements by frictional elements.
In many such concepts the vanes either perform back and forth motion of vanes and some others can achieve a more desired unidirectional variation in relative speeds.
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/553,857, discloses a rotary apparatus comprising of vanes fitted on sleeves, which are coupled and uncoupled with a shaft by means of coupling arrangement, however the single vanes per sleeve causes out of balance forces and require balancing at a different plane away from the plane of the vane inside the chamber. Similarly the torque variations through one rotation is high because of combustion occurring at a single point and once in a rotation and furthermore for correct and positive clutching and disengaging without any slipage is necessary for accurate control on magnitude of expansion and it becomes difficult as inertia increases at higher speeds.
All such mechanism discussed above have various differing drawbacks and limitations and many of these mechanisms only provide for pumping of fluids where energy is transferred to the fluids by such machine, but they are unable to perform effective motoring by fluids, wherein energy is transferred from fluids to the rotor elements.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,622,149 describes a rotary engine with radial vanes however it uses fluid bleeding arrangements for venting fluids to achieve varying expansion ratios, however these lead to loss of work and efficiency.
In fuel powered motors the size of combustion chambers is a major design factor as it influences flame travel distance, total time of combustion and heat losses through the casing surface area. These factors have direct bearing on thermal efficiencies. The centrally placed shafts in the known rotary concepts limits the reduction in ‘surface area to volume ratio’ of the torus and mean torus diameter and hence limiting the reduction in material and manufacturing cost and at the same time it also limits the reduction in heat loss by radiation. The degree of compactness influences the total volume and space requirements of such machine units and in many applications the higher the degree of reduction in total machine volume, for a given fluid volume, is beneficial. Similarly there are limitations in reduction in frictional losses due to limitation in improving the degree of compactness.
It would therefore be advantageous to provide an improved novel arrangement to overcome the above mentioned drawbacks and/or to provide various other benefits and advantages.